I don’t have problems with pink. (In high school, I did. I think it had something to do with power and baby blankets. Eh, we’re all stupid when we’re kids.) So my problem wasn’t the color.

The problem with the pink one was that it was cute*; it was so stinkin’ cute that I immediately had to do something to change the level of cute. Seriously. The Standard Model of particle physics does not support such cuteness. I had to have made a mistake somewhere; I had to change something. So this is my excuse for the box uglification: I did it for the Higgs boson.

CERN scientists and lab gurus, you may all thank me for my tireless service to modern science in making the box less cute. (Aside: I guess that we’ll find out on July 4th whether they actually found a Higgs at CERN. Exciting!)

Hello topic: I wrote all that nonsense to tell you this: I didn’t get a picture of the paper-covered box when it was really cute. Such was the intensity of cuteness that I, horrified, went on to the next step and completely forgot to take a picture. And the next step was to uglify it by distressing it with brown ink and black paint. Like this.

Front view: It looks like a box from a Tim Burton movie. All it needs is one side that's a parallelogram.

Do I dare open it? I dare...

ARGH!!! Someone call the EPA! HAZMAT team, stat!

Seriously, it looks like some kind of black mold is growing in there. I love it.

* So what’s my problem with cute? I am a post-twenty-something year old woman. There are many attributes to which I aspire in life; I probably have a list of them somewhere. Nowhere in that list of aspirational attributes will you find “cute.” Cute is for puppies and babies and kittehs and tweens and princesses who refuse to grow up.